It is often useful to provide a summary or descriptive title for a long body of text in order to present a brief synopsis to a reader. A summary is a shortened version of an original. Ideally, the summary conveys the most important or relevant information from the original. Thus, the summary helps a reader quickly understand the main ideas of the original, longer version. A title is similar to a summary, except a title is generally shorter than a summary and conveys less detailed information. Ideally, a title entices the reader to read an article or view an object associated with the title.
Sometimes, titles/summaries are space-limited to a threshold number of words, characters, and/or bytes. For example, in response to a search request, a search engine displays the title and summary for each corresponding search result of a set of search results. In order to provide a compact display of the search results in a format that is easy to analyze by an end user, the title and summary for each search result are restricted to be no longer than a threshold number of characters.
As another example, news websites may include photo slideshows, which contain images, such as photographs, arranged in sequence for presenting to an end user. Each image in the slideshow is generally associated with a long description of text, such as a description of the image or a news story associated with the image. When displaying a particular image to an end user, it is helpful to also show information about the previous image and next image in the slideshow. For instance, a descriptive title for these images may be generated based on the news story associated with the images. In order to ensure the title/summary of the previous image or next image fits within a certain display element, the title/summary is generally space-limited to a specific number of characters. Ideally, the descriptive titles should pique the reader's interest in viewing a photo in the slideshow.
According to one approach, titles and/or summaries are human-generated. For example, a human may read through a long description of text to determine and generate a title and/or summary that conveys the most important or relevant information from the original. Although this approach can produce high-quality titles/summaries depending on the person employed to perform the task, human-generated titles are inefficient and expensive. The task of determining an appropriate descriptive title/summary within a specified number of characters is both challenging and time-consuming.
According to another approach, the first sentence of a long body of text is used to generate a title/summary. If the summary is space-limited, the first sentence is truncated after the maximum number of words, character, and/or bytes. This approach is more efficient than the human-generated title approach; however, it often leads to awkward titles. For example, if the first sentence of an article is “Bob lives in Sunnyvale and is a software engineer at Yahoo!” and the words “engineer at Yahoo!” are truncated due to space-limitations, the descriptive title would be “Bob lives in Sunnyvale and is a software.” Because “software” and “engineer” are separated by the truncation, the title becomes confusing and grammatically incorrect.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.